Cracking the fortress: can we really decolonize psychology?

“Cracking” the status quo

No doubt as psychologists we know that change is usually met with resistance and defense by those who benefit from the status quo. Given Western-oriented psychology’s comfortable position in the global marketplace, and South African psychology’s co-option into it, calls for decolonization may seem like futile attempts to crack through an impenetrable fortress. After all, “psychology” as we know it is embedded in private and public healthcare, academia, popular culture, and international consciousness. The question of decolonizing psychology seems a sub-section of the more depressing question of whether or not we can decolonize society.

However, drawing on Holloway’s (2010) metaphor of “cracks” in a vulnerable, problematic system, Cornish et al. (2016) note that “[the] metaphor serves as signifier of small spaces and everyday acts of resistance . . . the small cracks that cumulatively produce the crumbling of seemingly impenetrable edifices of power” (p. 116). This is a pragmatic theory of change, relying on our willingness and ability to amplify short-term resistances and do things differently—widen the cracks—so that the fortress, held up by people, places, and practices, can no longer be sustained.

Fortunately, even if psychology is resistant to change, the zeitgeist has necessitated decolonization onto the national agenda. The student-led Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements were the tipping points for this conversation, critiquing the “rainbow nation” and “transformation” discourse and replacing a politics of hope and reconciliation with a politics of radical dissent and anger (Pillay, 2016). This redirected the “transformation” agenda in South African politics and citizenship with a more specific focus: decolonization.

Kessi (2015) further critiques the hidden agenda of “transformation” talk:

The reality is that the transformation discourse serves to sanitise, normalise, or conceal oppressive practices. When we speak of decolonisation, it becomes obvious why Rhodes must fall, whereas “transformation” inserts doubt or the possibility of “dialogue” into what are clearly cultural symbolisms of oppression and violence. By talking of a decolonised university, we highlight the historical legacies of capitalism, racism and patriarchy.

Ratele (2014) also laments the lackluster progress thus far:

I am against so-called transformation because the transformation we have settled for in PsySSA and other spaces and institutions in society is in large measure not what some of us dreamt about [where] middle-class, white, heteropatriarchal privilege and power is alive and well in our society. This power and privilege informs the teaching and education of psychology students and the practice of psychology. (p. 30)

Long (2016a) has further argued we move beyond the rhetoric of “Africanizing” psychology:

it is not the “whiteness” of psychology that leaves most South Africans cold, but its customary indifference to the question of class. The “decolonization” of the discipline cannot be achieved through the heady, though ultimately empty, rhetoric of “Africanization,” but only through a searching examination of the material conditions of oppression—and their disastrous psychological sequelae—that most of our fellow citizens continue to endure. (p. 431)

These diverse views show a recognition by psychologists in South Africa that we are not immune to calls for the decolonization of society, and we must engage seriously in this evolving conversation. Decolonization, despite being an extension of the ongoing relevance debate (Long, 2016b), is useful in that it introduces far more specificity into what a “relevant” psychology ought to look like by historically locating the debate as the dismantling, or cracking, of oppressive postcolonial relations of power. It calls for a specific psychopolitical orientation of the profession. As Kessi and Kiguwa (2015) similarly argue, “Psychology’s intersection with politics remains a core entry point for engaging a decolonisation project for a more relevant discipline” (p. 4).

Recent advances

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. (Leonard Cohen, Anthem)

Optimistically, the Journal of Social and Political Psychology began a special thematic section on “Decolonizing Psychological Science” in 2015. This is a global, open access, ongoing academic effort to publish a series of articles exploring the provisional theories and practices of decolonization. Series editors Adams, Dobles, Gómez, Kurtiş, and Molina (2015) argue that “a responsible psychology requires decolonisation of its hegemonic forms of knowing and being” and describe three emerging approaches to decolonization—indigenization, accompaniment, and denaturalization; along with two existing conceptual approaches—cultural psychology and liberation psychology.

Glen Adams was then invited to present a paper at the 22nd South African Psychology Congress in September 2016 to elaborate on the above. It is worth quoting the abstract here:

In the accompaniment approach to decolonisation, “global expert” researchers from centres of hegemonic knowledge production travel to marginalised communities to lend expertise and work alongside local inhabitants in struggles for social justice. In the indigenisation approach to decolonisation, locally grounded researchers draw upon local knowledge to modify “standard” practice and produce psychologies that are more responsive to local realities. In the denaturalisation approach to decolonisation, researchers draw upon local knowledge and experience of marginalised communities as an epistemic resource to reveal and dismantle the coloniality of knowledge and being in hegemonic psychology.

The above framework provides a useful way of thinking about existing and future work. This foregrounding of decolonization at the national Psychology Congress may be an indication of PsySSA’s commitment (rhetorically and aesthetically, at least) to appear relevant. These included a keynote address “Is South African Psychology Serving Humanity?” by Professor Saths Cooper, President of the International Union of Psychological Science and inaugural PsySSA president; an interdisciplinary plenary debate “Mapping the terrain: Decoloniality in South Africa”; a plenary debate that included representatives from each Psychology registration category, “Psychology’s response/ability: Crisis or catharsis?”; and the second annual Siphiwe Ngcobo memorial lecture, “Engaging the psychology of decolonization” by Professor Norman Duncan, in which he offered a useful framework for decolonizing the curricula.

The scientific program itself included four specific items that referred to decolonization in their abstracts: “Decoloniality and the liberatory potential of African-centered psychology” (Mkhize N); “From psychology in Africa to African psychology: Going nowhere slowly” (Makhubela M); and two roundtable debates “What does Equity and Transformation in PsySSA mean?” (Pillay SR) and “Transforming the curricula” (Maree D, Pule N, Ndala-Magoro N, Blokland L, Fynn A, Barnes B, Mkhize N).

This cursory review of the program shows promising emerging narratives within PsySSA and may omit presentations that contributed to the decolonization debate but was not foregrounded in its title or abstract, such as the symposia hosted by the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), a USA-based grouping invited by PsySSA; the Student Division, who focused on Fees Must Fall and student protests; and symposia hosted by Divisions for community and social psychology, gender and sexuality, trauma and violence, and African psychology.

This Congress built on the earlier International Conference on Community Psychology (ICCP) that took place in Durban in May 2016, a first for Africa, with the theme of Global dialogues on critical knowledges, liberation and community. Decolonization featured strongly, both in content and creative forms of delivery, aptly described as “creative undisciplining” by Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres during his keynote address (Malherbe, Helman, & Cornell, 2016).

Numerous other dialogue events on decolonization—applicable but not specific to psychology—took place across universities in 2016, such as the College of Human Sciences International Decoloniality Conference hosted by the University of South Africa (UNISA) in August 2016.

Additionally, the recent special edition on anti-apartheid activist Robert Sobukwe, in the local journal Psychology in Society (PINS) (Hayes & Hook, 2016), continues to offer an independent, psychopolitical, sustained critique of oppressive power relations and PINS is filled with diverse theoretical resources needed for a decolonization project (Hayes, 2003; Painter, 2014).

Toward a decolonial agenda

The crack is simply a push towards self-determination. (Holloway, 2010, p. 38)

Against the backdrop of this decolonial turn in psychology, fundamental cracks expose a weakening fortress. Holloway (2010) says “the method of the crack” views dominant systems “from the perspective of its crisis, its contradictions, its weaknesses, and . . . to understand how we ourselves are those contradictions” (p. 9). Are we therefore willing to continue scrutinizing and cracking our modes of being and doing psychology?

Admittedly, it would be naïve to suggest that a burst of agency and motivation among us will automatically lead to a vague utopian future that has yet to be clearly articulated. Instead, there needs to be dramatic interplay between agency and structure, that is, between psychologists deliberately disrupting their spheres of influence, and the active dismantling of the oppressive, violent structures that sustain mainstream, hegemonic, Western-oriented psychology (and its global marketplace function). This interplay between the individual and the system involves what Ascion (2016) calls unthinking modernity—an ambitious agenda of re-creating a society not dominated by the conditions of modernity, the very conditions that gave rise to the development of Western psychology as we know it (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010).

I would therefore argue that if we want to find ourselves on the right side of history this time around, and sustain this decolonial turn, we actively widen these cracks by creating ways of bridging rhetoric and reality, evolving from the virtuous aesthetics of socially relevant conferences and papers into the messy pragmatics of being socially responsive organizations and individuals. This is in fact the challenge of South African psychology, incessantly questioning its real-world relevance for decades (Long, 2016b).

In continuing to crack this edifice, I propose an initial agenda of five areas that require an urgent decolonial orientation with new forms of practice—Curriculum, Research, Selections, Interventions, and Attitudes:

It is our moral and intellectual imperative that decolonization does not just remain a buzzword and that we creatively and carefully rebel toward forms of psychological practices that truly benefit all South Africans. In this rebellion, we will meet resistance and take risks, but as Holloway (2010) reminds us, “cracks exist on the edge of impossibility, but they do exist” (p. 71). A luta continua.